The present invention relates to improved method and apparatus for automatically seaming a gore piece to the inside thigh section of a panty-hose, and more particularly relates to improvement in the system for seaming a gore piece to the inside thigh section of a panty-hose in an almost automatic fashion.
The conventional system for producing a gored panty-hose in general two-staged seaming operations. In the first stage, two leg sections and a panty section are seamed together by the so-called skip seaming whilst leaving an unseamed opening in the inside thigh section of an incomplete panty-hose. Next in the second stage, a separate gore piece is fitted to the above-described thigh section opening and its fringe is seamed to the unseamed sliced fringe of the thigh section, which defined the opening, in order to form a complete panty-hose.
Due to the complicated form of the seaming line for coupling of the gore piece with the sliced fringe on the inside thigh section, the second staged seaming operation is extremely complicated and difficult to practice successfully.
For this reason, the seaming of the gore piece has conventionally depended upon manual operation by expert operators. This naturally causes low productivity of the second stage seaming operation, increased human labour and resultant high increase in the production cost of gored panty-hoses.
In addition, it is very difficult even for a single operator to constantly seam a gore piece to the correct position in the thigh section in a correct manner since the seaming is dependent upon manual operation. This connects to inter-products variance in quality of panty-hoses so produced. When different panty-hoses are produced by different operators, the variance is further amplified since the inter-products variance is accompanied with inter-operators variance. Thus, in the conventional production of gore panty-hoses, one cannot expect uniform quality of the products.
In order to avoid this advantage, a number of automatic seaming systems for gored panty-hoses have been proposed. Due to the unavoidable presence of the above-described complicated seaming line, however, one cannot expect reliable operations of the apparatuses for practicing such automatic seaming systems. In order to obtain high reliability in operation, one needs to adopt an extremely complicated design for such an apparatus. Thus, it is the state of the art that none of the conventionally proposed systems has been able to carry out the second stage automatic seaming operation with appreciably sufficient results.